The History of Microsoft: From Software to Cloud Computing During a Greatest Success Period to today and tomorrow. A Conversation with Michael Brutman

“The company’s ability to alter itself is remarkable and it is quite unusual,” she said. Many companies just keep riding the same horse and will eventually fade away.

Microsoft is a big believer in artificial intelligence. With its partner OpenAI, Microsoft has built ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. Microsoft is using its in-house software Copilot in some of its products.

Today, the company is reinventing itself yet again. Microsoft Azure, its cloud computing platform, has been a big revenue driver. The company’s large network of data centers helps it sell technology services to businesses who need cloud computing to run their artificial intelligence applications.

Microsoft was founded in 1975, and IBM supplied software for the company’s first PC in 1980. This became the foundation of MS-DOS, which dominated IBM-compatible PCs during the ’80s. Microsoft’s early success in developing software for PCs eventually led to the first version of Windows in 1985 and a dream of a PC on every desk and in every home.

Microsoft failed to compete with its 2006 ill-fated answer to the iPod. The Windows Phone and Kin, Microsoft’s attempts at a phone business, were a failure.

That system introduced household names we still use today: Word, PowerPoint, Excel. The idea that applications could be used across industries and parts of society was something new.

While Microsoft was improving Windows with every release, it was also developing a variety of productivity apps throughout the 1980s that would soon become the company’s Office suite. Office, originally for the Mac, became an important productivity suite on Windows that can be found now inside a web browser. Microsoft is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world because it has Office and Windows, which are used by billions of people.

Instead of typing commands, Windows allowed users to navigate by pointing and clicking on colorful, intuitively-named icons. Microsoft didn’t invent the graphic operating system, but it did make it cheaper and more widely available — and that really helped personal computers take off.

Still, the advent of the PC — short for personal computer — meant that ordinary people were learning how to type those commands. They might encounter a PC in their school or office if they weren’t employed by a research university or corporation.

Michael Brutman had it installed at a recent vintage computer festival. He said that the environment of the DOS was very minimal. Really minimal. He also had a black screen where you can type in commands, which was the same size as the manual.

Timing the Transformation: Bill Gates and Paul Allen Open a Micro-Soft, or What Has Happened to Computer Science in Seattle?

Growing up in Seattle, childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen were obsessed with an emerging industry called computing. The only place they could get their hands on the technology that caught their eyes was the University of Washington’s computer lab.

They took so many liberties with the lab’s equipment that the director sent Allen a letter telling him to turn in his key. Little did Allen know that in 2017, he’d read that letter aloud to a crowd gathered to celebrate the dedication of a new computer science school in his name.

A company called MITS sold the computer as a kit. An apple crate without a screen, lights and switches on the front, is called an Altair. You could program it by punching holes in paper.

Ed Lazowska says that Allen went running to Bill and told him we had to catch the train. “The rest is history.”

Together, they built something called an “interpreter,” which would tell the computer how to execute commands from the user. They offered to license the program to MITS, which could sell it along with the kits. MITS said yes. They were doing business.

Micro-Soft was started by friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Gates and Allen created the company to develop software for the Altair 8800, an early personal computer as a way to focus the company on chips and software.

Microsoft wasn’t the only company that was creating programming. Sometimes it was just a simple two-bit code. The problem was that computer makers wrote programs that only worked on certain machines. They couldn’t be used on other devices. Microsoft’s big idea was to create programming that would work on many models and then be sold seperately.

Back in the 1970s, the new industry was facing a big limitation: a small pool of customers. Gates was attempting to get the early adopters of the computer to become paying customers, and they were primarily kit hobbyists or the educational institutions that could afford mainframes.

“When Microsoft launched, it was in universities and big companies locked in big air conditioning rooms, with multimillion dollar computers, and they used digital technology,” she said.

Digital technology is all around and that’s the transformation, said Lazowska. Today, he says computing is so common, we barely think about it. He said that the vision of Bill and Paul drove the transformation.

The first home computers that IBM rolled out in the early 80s had Microsoft’s next big innovation in front of it. The Microsoft Disk Operating System was known as “MS-DOS” for short.

Microsoft is celebrating fifty years in business today at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, the software maker will unveil new features called Copilot, and we are expecting to see familiar faces from the past and present.

Microsoft has attempted a variety of hardware over the years, but one of its most successful is Surface, which was launched in 2012 alongside Windows 8. The Surface has been used as a venue to demonstrate the best of Windows and Office and it is soon going to be used as a testing ground for Microsoft’s ambitions on the PC.